So where is it written that the bad guy can't be the star? Truthfully, nowhere.

An interesting twist on conventional storytelling is to make the The Protagonist a villain. Sometimes (but not always), this villainous main character will even get the Sympathetic P.O.V.. On the other hand, it is not necessary for a villain to be sympathetic for them to be this trope. They simply need to be a villain whose morally reprehensible actions (however well-intentioned) are in no way glossed over or justified within the context of the story. We are seeing the story from the villain's point of view.

Played with in DKA: The land is torn with war, the forces of Light embattled with the vile Keepers- heralds and servants of dark gods. The Avatar of all that is good has been slain. So it has been for fifteen years when, suddenly, out of nowhere, a sorceress of unfathomable power emerges. Keeper Mercury. Taking the form of a lovely young woman, this semi-demon seems to posses the antithesis of the Light's power. Amoral and fiendishly intelligent, who knows what manner of cunning works behind that deceptive smile...

Justin as Kira in Kira Is Justice. However, his motive is that he is using the Death Note because he feels like "it is his duty".

King Superman: Each and every one of the protagonists qualify, for acts including using the children of Little Lamplight as slaves and human shields, repeatedly leaving behind friends and allies to save their own asses, and convincing Cliff Briscoe to chug radioactive sludge.

The Pony POV Series, being a POV series, does this on occasion. But the example that stands out is Princess Luna during her second POV. She starts out as a hero, but eventually performs a Face–Heel Turn due to her overpossessiveness of Pip. She gets into an argument with Celestia, resulting in her killing and bringing Pip back to life as an immortal undead so she can have him forever. When Celestia tries to convince her against making him immortal, she tries to murder her, killing a number of innocent ponies in the process. This leads to Celestia being a Hero Antagonist and fighting back to stop her now insane sister, ultimately killing her. It was All Just a Dream, but still!

A milder example, but one that shouldn't be overlooked regardless, is any of the chapters set in the Epilogue timeline. Being a Villain World where Discord won, it's to be expected that about 99% of the story is told from the POV of either Discord himself or the discorded Mane Six, who now serve as his Co-Dragons. At least until Twilight Tragedy performs a Heel–Face Turn, followed shortly there after by Liarjack. They then redeem Rarigreed and, much later, Traitor Dash and Angry Pie.

Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Prison Island Break has all the main cast as violent convicted criminals. They don't even have a particuarly heroic goal; they just want to escape. But because the story is centered on them, they get the Sympathetic P.O.V. and you completely forget they're a collection of terrorists, serial killers and rapists (even though the writer never lets you forget).

In the short story series Lex Luthor Triumphant Lex Luthor gives Lois Lane an interview 8 months after Superman vanished without a trace. Then it goes places.

Jade's Face–Heel Turn in Queen of All Oni is what kicks off the entire plot in the first place, and she gets more much more focus than the heroes trying to stop her (though the author's started to rectify that in the latest chapters).

Pages Of Harmony has Twilight Sparkle, who kidnaps, tortures, and Mind Rapes her friends to extract their Elements. She is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who sincerely believes her plan to destroy chaos and let Harmony rule are good, even if it means killing her friends, coldly murdering ponies who get in her way before her plans are set, and utterly destroying every disharmonious being in all of reality.

Maylu Sakurai from Maylu's Revenge. She wanted to get revenge against Roll for her actions as Empress in "Evil Empress Roll", the two-parter episode this fanfic takes place after. And she's willing to get it, even siding with World Three.

Played with and ultimately subverted in Story of the Century. L is actually the Anti-Hero Protagonist (or the closest out of anyone in the fanfic to a protagonist) but he tends to get the villain treatment in Erin's point of view, with Light, Misa and the whole task force as his long-suffering and far more heroic workmates. Higuchi looks like the real villain at first, but the REAL villains and antagonists turn out to be Light and Misa, like L had been saying all along.

The Company™ in the crossover fanfic Event Horizon: Storm of Magic is either this, or Anti-Hero at best. Yeah, they engage in a lot of questionable business practices (e.g. selling weapons to both sides of the Stark-Lannister war), but they also oppose the omnicidal factions like Chaos and Mordor, and they've introducing a lot of social and technological progress to these worlds as well.

The eponymous Wreck-It Ralph stars an oldschool arcade villain who's tired of being ostracized for being the bad guy. He goes on a quest to prove that he can be just as heroic as his good-guy rival, Fix-It Felix Jr.

Ralph is actually a bit of a subversion, since he's the villainin name only. He's actually just as much of a hero as Felix, but because it's his job to be the bad guy, the NPCs are assholes to him until the end of the film, when they grow to respect him.

Live-Action TV

Oz, being set in a prison, naturally revolves around the inmates, many of whom are guilty of murder, rape, drug dealing, etc.

The Sopranos: Considering that well over half the cast is in the Mob, this trope was bound to pop up. Even the nicer ones have no problem with murder, drug trafficking, and other unsavory, illegal activities. And chances are, if you're not in the mob, you're a huge Jerkass who just doesn't happen to be as morally bankrupt.

Walter White of Breaking Bad slowly evolves toward this over the course of the first four seasons, but remains an Anti-Hero by always struggling against someone worse. By the fifth season, however, Walter has become a cold and cruel man, and his opposition is his own family. He's become the Big Bad in his own story.

There are a few episodes of iCarly where even Freddie and Carly end up going against Sam when she does something bad. Example, starting a child labour sweatshop.

Sylar of Heroes. In the first season he's the Big Bad, but in the second and subsequent seasons he's a protagonist and goes through a Heel–Face Revolving Door, spending some portions as a hero and more portions as a villain.

To the extent that they are protagonists, rather than Echo, the staff of the Dollhouse is this. Although their villainy lessens over time, especially in season 2 as a Greater Evil is uncovered.

All male members of the Blake's 7 crew flirt with this, even Blake when you consider that in the finale of season 2 it's made clear that he was fully willing to cause the deaths of millions of people (by computer failure) in order to take down the Federation.

Francis Urquhart in the BBC series House of Cards and its sequels To Play the King and The Final Cut. Urquhart is a Richard III-esque British MP who schemes his way up to being Prime Minister via various sneaky and some downright evil acts.

Frank Underwood in the House of Cards U.S. remake is a ruthless politician who will do anything for more power. In Shakespearean tradition, he frequently gives snide, sneering and self-satisfied asides to the audience, letting the viewer see inside his twisted mind. Also applies increasingly to his wife Claire as she gets more and more focus and power. They're both pretty damn evil, really.

Al Swearingen in the first season of Deadwood is a co-protagonist and the main villain, with Seth Bullock as the heroic co-protagonist. In the second and third season, the Hearst enterprises serve as the villain and Al becomes a more sympathetic Anti-Hero.

Almost every episode of Columbo started off from the villain's point-of-view as he or she carried out a supposedly perfect murder.

The Borgias: Rodrigo Borgia, also known as Pope Alexander Sextus, is this. He's Affably Evil, has four kids and an openly-known mistress, and has no problem with blackmail or bribery, and pimps his kids out to the highest bidder. Plus, there's all of the less-than-ethical executions he's considered, and the situations his children have had to endure—in what amounts to emotional abuse. His elder son, Cesare, is an even better example, what with the killing people, having a personal assassin as a best friend, and really loving his sister, though that's probably the least villainous part of his personality. If history has anything to say about it, he gets worse.

Harry Montebello in The Straits has been known to kill people by feeding them to a variety of exotic wildlife. This is because he takes the security of his drug-smuggling business and his family extremely seriously.

24 has a couple: in the penultimate season there was Tony Almeida who actually eclipsed Jack for a good chunk of the season by working with a group of terrorists and actually is the first to plan out an attack on a subway station all so he could work his way up try and kill their leader, and in the final season both Allison Taylor who protects the masterminds behind a successful assassination attempt on a foreign government official and Jack Bauer himself who attempts to assassinate said masterminds even though his doing so starts indirectly putting innocent people in danger, so much so that he ultimately nearly stars a world war trying to kill the one in charge.

Scandal: Olivia Pope and her team start out as traditional protagonists, but that changes at the start of season 2. For starters, Olivia and Supreme Court Justice Verna shut down Quinn's trial to save Quinn. David Rosen is unhappy about that, and he decides to dig for answers about Quinn. It turns out that Olivia, Verna, Cyrus, Mellie, and Hollis are working together in some sort of conspiracy. Olivia had an affair with President Fitz for a long time, despite the fact that Fitz is still married to Mellie. Also, Olivia participated in rigging the election so that Fitz would become President. She also sabotaged David's efforts to find answers. When you put it together, you have a group of protagonists who are actually villains and not heroes.

The Americans protagonists are deep-cover KGB sleeper agents in the United States in 1981. The main antagonist is the FBI agent who is trying to catch them. It's an American series, so it definitely qualifies for this trope (though beyond any nationalistic bias, the protagonists frequently commit acts that would be considered murder no matter where their loyalties lie).

Dexter Morgan in Dexter. The protagonist is a serial killer; he murders people as his hobby. Several steps are taken to make the audience sympathize with him: he only kills bad guys, he has a bad past and lots of reasons, and so on, but the fact remains that he's a serial-murdering sociopath. The series flirts with drawing him as a hero, especially in season 2, but he never quite makes it. He makes some less-researched, more impulsive kills as the series progresses. Later, especially at the end of the seventh season, Dexter begins to appear more and more evil, as his psychosis starts to catch up to him and the people he loves.

Edmund Blackadder of the Blackadder series is a greedy, self-centred arse who enjoys insulting those around him and will happily betray, abuse and mis-treat those around him, especially his inferiors. Frankly, if he wasn't played by Rowan Atkinson he'd be almost completely unlovable. Averted - albeit temporarily - in "Blackadder's Christmas Carol", and in the final minutes of the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth.

Shameless: Frank Gallagher is an alcoholic, lying, dishonest, violent, neglectful parent, but he's still the main character.

Early seasons of Sons of Anarchy paint Jax Teller as the more idealistic (though far from innocent) alternative to his violent, crooked stepfather Clay Morrow. But near the end of Season 4, that all changes. A series of tragedies in Jax's personal life cause him to be sidetracked onto a path of revenge, and he becomes increasingly violent, manipulative, and generally controlled by evil. The show attempts to portray him favorably by putting SAMCRO up against some of the worst criminals imaginable, but his efforts to defeat them always wind up causing him and his club more mental anguish. By the start of Season 7, it's apparent that Jax has become the villain of his own story.

Kiera Cameron is the protagonist in the series Continuum and objectively would be considered a villain on the basis of her background and goals. She is a former soldier and police officer from a police state that has enslaved a large part of humanity (one of her first scenes shows her obliterating several rebels) and her primary goal is to protect that future so that she can return home to her family. This means stopping the rebels who are trying to prevent that police state from coming into existence. She is a bit lighter than most true villains though and should probably be considered a type III Anti-Villain. Of course, it's Grey and Grey Morality since although the rebels' goals are just, their tactics are quite brutal, including simple terrorism. Things quickly become far more complicated, and Kiera grows into more of an anti hero over time, even allying with said rebels. Even before this, she had been shown not to approve of her government's more heinous actions.

House of Saddam chronicles the rise and fall of Iraq's infamous former dictator.

Discussed in the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Hercules", where — behind the scenes — the lead actor Kevin Sorbo goes missing, forcing the writers to consider changing the show to account for Hercules' disappearance, and two of the staff members, a gun nut and an unhinged psychopath played by the actors who play Ares and Xena's nemesis Callisto, gleefully propose spinoff series about Ares and Callisto respectively.

Though a third writer, Alex Kurtzman, notes that without Hercules as Hero Antagonist, there'd be nothing for them to do. Cut to Ares and Callisto playing an overblown game of rock-paper-scissors.

Hitler: The Rise of Evil: To be expected in a biographical miniseries that focuses on Adolf Hitler. The main character is a racist demagogue who wants to institute a new dictatorial empire and annihilate the Jews.

Justified splits its screentime equally between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens and Harlan County crime boss Boyd Crowder, the latter of whom, as a ruthless criminal trying to take control of the county, is a definite example of this.

The Vampire Diaries didn't start out this way, but as more of the Main Characters became vampires, and even "good" vampires like Stefan were revealed to have done horrific things, Villain Protagonists became the norm. By the end of the third season, Elena admits that killing all the vampires in the world, including her friends, would actually be the right thing to do, and that trying to keep them alive, at the expense of who-knows-how-many people they'll go on to kill, makes her the bad guy. To which she adds, "Fine, I'll be the bad guy."

Every leading character in Black Sails falls into this, by merit of being pirates, or being directly connected to/supporting piracy. Of particular note is Captain Flint, who is fighting for a noble goal, yet murders, cheats, lies and back-stabs his way towards it, and during his trial in season 2, the amount of paper that it takes to present the testimonies against him is nearly comical.

After a certain point in season 1 of Homeland and throughout season 2, the audience is aware of POW turned terrorist Nicholas Brody having ill intentions of which the intelligence agent protagonists are unaware, and the audience's sympathies are split between wanting to see them stop him and seeing if/how he can overcome various obstacles in his way. In season 5, a significant amount of the plot involves a new character, Allison, who is a Double Agent for Russia. The regular cast members essentially play a Hero Antagonist role in relation to her, as she plays them against each other and later on, attempts to evade discovery and capture.

Supernatural: By the end of Season 10, it's clear that Sam and Dean Winchester are the biggest threats currently out there, and only barely any better than the things they hunt, if at all.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has a Deconstruction. The protagonist Rebecca is not really a bad person, but she moved all the way to West Covina just to reunite with her ex-boyfriend, and has repeatedly done bizarre schemes to get together with him, even though he's with someone else. The ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend Valencia is portrayed as an Alpha Bitch who sees other women as "just jealous of her", but the show makes it on many occasions that Rebecca's actions to steal Josh away, however she may justify them to herself, are still wrong. Rebecca herself comes to think so, in her Heel Realization song "I'm The Villain In My Own Story".

The narrator of Warren Zevon's "Mr. Bad Example". He starts out stealing from a church fund for widows and orphans, and only gets worse. The Ax-Crazy "Excitable Boy" would be another example.

Hip-Hop artists like Jay-Z or 50 Cent were allegedly criminals before having music careers, and many of their songs deal with this topic from their perspective.

The viewpoint character of Voltaire's song "When You're Evil" is a Card-Carrying Villain. Also "Almost Human", and "The Chosen" and "Brains"... he kinda likes that one.

The Rake from The Decemberists' "The Rake's Song" sings, without so much as a hint of regret, about how he killed his three children in order to escape from the responsibilities of parenthood. It's quite good.

Nick Cave has a few songs about villain protagonists, most notably the entire album Murder Ballads.

Peter Gabriel's songs "Intruder" and "Family Snapshot" are told from the perspectives of a burglar and Lee Harvey Oswald, respectively.

The Primus song "My Name Is Mud" is sung from the perspective of a man who murdered his friend and is burying the body.

Everything that happens in a Monster Magnet song happens with a fistful of pills. Protagonists run the gamut from garden-variety drug abusers/dealers to comic-book-style supervillains and demonic agents. There are a lot of bombs getting planted, and things might get a little rape-y. Notable are the infanticidal couple of "See You in Hell", the drug-addled character in "Tractor", and various personifications of evil in "Kiss of the Scorpion", "Atomic Clock", and "Bummer".

I drove out to the Meadowlands to throw our baby away. —"See You in Hell"

If you wanna spank your demons and make them pay, well baby, I'm your man of the hour —"Bummer"

Got a knife in my back, got a hole in my arm, I'm driving a tractor on a drug farm —"Tractor"

"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen is sung by a condemned murderer who is only sorry he didn't get away with it. Maybe. At the very least, we know Beelzebub has a devil put aside for him. For him. For hiiiiiiiiiiiim.

Ziltoid from the Ziltoid the Omniscient album by Devin Townsend is definitely this. He destroys earth, because he didn't like the coffee they presented him, follows the escaping humans to another planet, unsuccessfully attempts to destroy that one, then he asks the Planet Smasher to destroy another planet, which is populated by sentient being, just to lift his mood.

The Nirvana song "Polly" is sung from the point of view of a rapist who holds his victim captive and tortures her with razors and a blowtorch. It was based on a true story.

Many, many Vocaloid songs. Notable examples include Mothy-P's Story of Evil and the numerous "yandere" songs like "Luka's Love Disease," "Miku's Rotten Girl," and "Grotesque Romance."

The Eagles' 1973 album Desperado tells the story of real-life wild west outlaws Bill Doolin and Bill Dalton.

The main character from Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral starts off as someone who indulges heavily in sex and drugs to try to feel something, but crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he eventually rapes someone.

Several songs on Year Zero are also from the villains' perspectives. "God Given" and "Capital G" are from the viewpoints of the corrupt church and state respectively, "The Great Destroyer" is most likely the viewpoint of a character known as "The Angry Sniper," and the last half of "The Warning" has the disembodied hand in the sky known as The Presence threaten to destroy mankind if they don't change their ways.

The band, Fear Factory's, earlier albums were based on a continues storyline about a futuristic war between man and machine; machines being the villains. Many of their songs at the time had the machine leader giving it's commentary on wanting to wipe out the human race.

Barnacle Bill the Sailor from the Bawdy Song of the same name is occasionally depicted as this, especially in the more vulgar versions of the song. If the fair young maiden asks what will happen if her parents see him, he will answer that he will "kill your pa and fuck your ma". When asked about what will happen if he goes to jail, Barnacle Bill will brag that he will escape. At the very least, the cleaner versions of the song make it clear that Barnacle Bill is not a pleasant fellow.

Mythology and Religion

Iktomi in numerous Lakota fables. Despite being a member of the Wacan Sica, he is also the paradigm of human advancement, meaning that he will appear in these stories to teach the characters and readers valuable lessons (often indirectly).

Thomas in Old Harry's Game is the focus of most of the story lines he's in. He's also such a godawful person that Satan (himself an example of this trope) is shocked by how evil he is at times.

Roleplay

Destroy The Godmodder: In Be the Godmodders, you played as godmodders, trashing the last safe haven left.

Tabletop Games

After two expansions to their Middle Earth CCG, Iron Crown Entertainment tried shaking things up by releasing a whole second basic set called "The Lidless Eye", casting the players as one of the nine Nazgul, working in the shadows to locate the Ringbearer and/or rally the monstrous races into an army. An interesting idea, but unfortunately, one which did nothing to stem fan complaints of "filler lore", and only ruffled more feathers by being largely incompatible with cards from the previous set.

In the main 40k game, playing as any of the "evil" factions will automatically lead to this, with even the fluff in the book is less sympathetic. This is most notable with the aforementioned chaos space marines and Tyranids, the latter of which usually has fluff written in an Apocalyptic Log style. This is more true during global campaigns, where the victories of "evil" factions will slowly edge the plot towards a downer ending, and the player base will still cheer for it.

The basic assumption when you play an Abyssal in Exalted. One chapter even has discussion about how to make the game more than one slaughterfest after another; they are that Baaad.

This is where you're assumed to start as a Green Sun Prince. Subverted, however, if you quickly catch on that the Yozis are (A) certifiably insane and (B) can't actually rope you in. You can become a Punch Clock Villain looking for an escape, a Well-Intentioned ExtremistAnti-Hero using a loose interpretation of your orders to push an ultimately productive agenda, or just a plan ol' Noble Demon who just wants to be left alone, before you slip the leash entirely.

Many gamelines of the World of Darkness have the players as traditional "monsters", vampires, werewolves, mummies, etc. But there are few where the player character actually has to be evil, Beast: The Primordial is one of those exceptions. Beasts have to inspire fear, often destructively, else their Soul runs rampant and does it anyway, with a chance of creating Heroes obsessed with slaying them.

Though not specific to any system in particular, it's very much the point to many campaigns. The "evil campaign" is often used to change things up where the PCs are the group of troublesome goblins, the terrorizing bandits or eclectic grouping of monsters. The goals tend to vary from pure destruction for the sake of destruction, sticking it to a certain group, actual goals of city/country/world domination or even a subversion of the genre.

Tamburlaine features as its protagonist a man who mutilates, kills, subjugates, and rapes at any opportunity he gets. He locks up the Ottoman Emperor in a cage and feeds him his wife; he kills one of his own sons for being unwilling to fight; he is driven around in a chariot drawn by deposed kings and emperors. In the end, he burns a Qor'an and dies suddenly.

Medea from Greek Myth, at least as presented by Euripides in the play Medea. A straight reading of the facts of the myth makes Medea come across as an irredeemably evil multiple murderess (her victims included her younger brother and her sons), yet Euripides presents her as sympathetic, or at least understandable.

In Used Cars, the salesman protagonists lie, cheat, and steal from essentially everyone they meet.

Volpone of Volpone is a greedy and lecherous con man; the play's main plot is about him faking being on the edge of death to trick people into giving him gifts in the hopes that he'd name them as his heir.

Arnolphe, from The School for Wives (L'école des femmes), is a clear example, although he is usually seen as sympathetic because all his plans are easily thwarted and his villainy stems mostly from his desire to have a loving wife who will not be unfaithful to him.

Don Giovanni of Don Giovanni is a lecherous noble who has had sex with over two thousand women before callously abandoning them. The opera begins with him trying to rape a woman, then killing her father when he defends her honor.

While most of the cast of Great Britain are morally ambiguous at best, the main character, Paige Britain, is most definitely a villain, being a worker at a tabloid paper, who rapidly becomes more corrupt and goes to greater ends to try and further her career. She eventually crosses the Moral Event Horizonby allowing a Page Seven model to starve to death so she can have the exclusive rights to her death story.

Saya no Uta's protagonist and female lead are an insane, cannibalistic killer and an amoral Eldritch Abomination, respectively. Although one doesn't start out that way and they're both very, very sympathetic.

A number of "dark" visual novels of the H variety feature a protagonist who, from the beginning, intends nothing better than to rape and/or enslave as many targets as possible.

The Fourth is about Dark Lord Tiberius Skarva IV and his plans to take over the local kingdom.

Darken features a party of evil characters led by Gort, the Lord of Hellfire, who wants to unite the three Artifacts of Hell in order to become a demonic demi-god and rule all of Darken with an iron fist.

The Last Days of FOXHOUND is as pure an example of this trope as you can find, given that the six lead characters are all the freak mercenary terrorists that Solid Snake must fight in Metal Gear Solid. It's also a subversion. Foxhound might be villains by the time Metal Gear Solid, but they start out the comic as heroes working for the US government, and remain so right up until the very end, where they become heroes working against The Patriots, Metal Gear's version of the Illuminati.

Every character in Cry Havoc bar Hati is greedy, violent, sadistic, or manipulative. The only defining characteristic the protagonists share is a sense of group loyalty (that may or may not be innate).

Dr. Kinesis, and in fact, most of the main characters in Evil Plan. The webcomic is about supervillains, so this trope applies heavily.

Jared features three main characters who are all varying shades of evil; Jared, Mary and Lilac, as well as some with questionable motives; corrupt police officer Carl and Hat Cat. The good guy is not introduced until the last page of the first arc.

Second Empire has the Daleks of the Second Dalek Empire going against the slightly more evil First Dalek Empire.

Voodoo Walrus ended their first year with a massive storyline focusing on baddies Mac and Shmeerm viciously taking down Big Bad Cyradwee and every last one of his underlings.

Minion Comics focuses on the lives of minions who sign up with an evil organization.

Goblins follows a band of goblins from a role-playing game, usually regarded as low-level adventurer fodder, leading you to expect it would be this. However, the goblins are actually pretty heroic. A couple of straight examples do occur in the series, though, particularly the character of K'Seliss. (K'Seliss is part of a party including a couple of more admirable characters, though; the truly evil characters in the setting are never really used as viewpoint characters.)

When She Was Bad focuses on Gail Swanson, a gang member who accidentally receives some superpowers meant for Amber Price, who is The Chosen One and also happens to be an Alpha Bitch who bullied her in high school. Rather than be a hero like Amber, Gail decides to use her powers to become a supervillain.

Asa and Rook of Hotblood!, who — when introduced to us, the audience — are hightailing it away from law inforcement. Rook notes he has a bounty of $800 on his head (a lot of money, for The Wild West).

Beyond The Veil is about a deposed Galactic Emperor resurrected in the stolen body of a hapless (female) explorer. Her plan to regain her throne seems to involve spreading misinformation and fear by unleashing a genetically engineered monster and a henchman who can't remember what order to Rape, Pillage, and Burn on a medieval planet.

The main protagonist of Baskets of Guts is a three hundred years old lich, who wants to conquer the world with an army of undead. And though for the most of the story he may seem to be funny, reasonable and kind of passive, his intentions are genuine.

Unlike most superhero based Shared Universe's. The Metaverse focuses primarily on the villains. And then, a lot of the heroes aren't all that heroic...

In Sailor Moon Abridged, Raye/Sailor Mars is very much this, being a Satan-worshipper (Human Sacrifice included) who was more than happy to take Molly up on her offer of "Kill me first!" when she defended Nephlyte. All of it is played for laughs.

Though this really counts as a Deconstruction: Billy/Dr. Horrible insists that Utopia Justifies the Means, but even he seems confused sometimes about his motives ("All the cash, all the fame—and social change!/Anarchy, that I run..."), in contrast to Penny's more traditional, charitable methods of improving the world. And, of course, there's the ending.

Muschio in Dive Quest's goal is to "become the Devil" and has no qualms about burning down peaceful villages and assassinating his rivals to get his way.

Muschio: When I was very young, I asked my mother what I would have grown up to be, if I were not the Prince. She told me, "Muschio. Whatever you desire, that you shall have tenfold. If you want to be a soldier, you will become a general. If you want to be a monk, you shall become pope." I wanted to be a villain. *Beat* And I do not intend to stop until I have become the Devil.

The point of the entire seriesCause of Death, where individual serial killers and psychos end up joining together and, in some cases, dueling against one another. It's up to the viewer to decide who to root for, because everyone in the show is going to Hell anyway.

In Worm, not only is the protagonist a villain (well, sort of, at first — although she later becomes one for sort-of real) but most of the perspectives seen via Interludes are also villainous. Anti-villainy varies greatly.

Michael from The Salvation War. Though the humans are undoubtedly the real heroes of the story, Michael acts as our main viewpoint in Heaven, and has quite sympathetic motivations in wanting to limit the damage done to Heaven when the humans inevitably invade, even as he keeps crossing the Moral Event Horizon to accomplish this.

Iriana from Ilivais X gradually becomes this. At first, she's mostly freaked out, having narrowly escaped from an eternity of servitude to an empire that half-unwittingly tortured her for more than half of her life. As such, she spends her first week or so taking respite, learning to use the eponymous robot, defending herself, getting in close with Mille, and generally being moderately suspicious but even pitiable at times. But soon she realizes the infinitely destructive power of her robot, and her grudge against the Aztecs and the world in general begins to surface. She begins antagonizing the empires far more adamantly for little reason aside from wanting them destroyed, manipulates and forces people into serving her (especially Mille), and shows an unwillingness to accept things that aren't in her control- and if that doesn't change, she deigns to erase it from existence.

In the prequel segments of Red vs. Blue, the Freelancers fall in this category... but they're not portrayed as bad guys, just as guys being told the bad things they're doing are actually for good reasons.

The Joker Blogs: Lampshaded by patient 4479 himself in episode 17. "You want to hear something funny? Right now, they are all rooting for me.''"

SF Debris portrays Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager in this way - a power-crazed, murderous sadist who is deliberately spreading chaos throughout the Delta Quadrant and has set up a Xanatos Gambit to gain control of the Alpha Quadrant.

The webseries Gotham Girls stars four of Batman's most prominent supporting ladies. One of them is the vigilante superhero Batgirl... and the other three are jewel thief Catwoman, eco-terrorist Poison Ivy and supporting henchgirl Harley Quinn. Their shenanigans can be entertaining, but they never let up with the thievery and crime.

While Lumpy is usually portrayed as well-meaning but extremely stupid, there are some episodes where he is instead portrayed as this, such as "We're Scrooged" where he murders Toothy for the sake of selling his body parts, "Banjo Frenzy" when he goes on a killing spree because nobody liked his song, and "All in Vein" when he's a vampire, and not the friendly kind.

Lifty and Shifty are the focus of most episodes where they appear. They also swindle and steal from the other characters on a regular basis, often knowingly killing the victim in the process.

While Splendid is usually just a Heroic Comedic Sociopath, he's this full-on in his one appearance in "Ka-Pow!" when he starts a fight with Splendont which destroys half the town and kills countless people just because Splendont wouldn't shake his hand.

While Flippy isn't a villain to start with (most of the time), his Superpowered Evil Side usually takes over midway through most episodes focusing on him.

Many Youtube Poop protagonists will murder, rape, and do all kinds of horrific things for little to no reason.

In The Iron Teeth, Blacknail frequently murders and steals, and does not even comprehend why any action that doesn't further his or his master's interests might be morally wrong.

Gumball Watterson of The Amazing World of Gumball sometimes crosses the line from Jerk with a Heart of Gold to what can only be described as "dangerous psychopath Played for Laughs": In "The Saint" he spends the entire episode harassing Alan, making all his friends and his girlfriend hate him, and sells his parents into slavery just because it annoys him that Alan is so perfect. In "The Spoiler" he goes crazy trying to avoid hearing any spoilers about a movie he's going to watch, even knocking someone out with a shovel and eating another student alive. In "The Laziest", he and Darwin deliberately ruin Lazy Larry's life just so that he'll help them win a bet.

Resident Alien Roger from American Dad!. He started out as a sympathetic, vaguely hedonistic alien, but over time he has established himself as a volatile, dangerous sociopath.

One episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold completely redid the series as Joker: The Vile and the Villainous. The storyline was adapted from an issue of the seventies Joker comic.

Dan of Dan Vs., is short-tempered, paranoid, and violent, and each episode is about him seeking revenge for some slight, real or imagined.

Captain Hero from Drawn Together is a psychotic murder-rapist who wiped out the entire rest of his species out of spite. The entire cast qualifies for this, really, with the exceptions of Xandir, Foxxy, and sometimes Wooldoor.

Zordrak and the Urpneys of The Dreamstone usually act this, in that each episode starts and ends from their perspective and we generally spend more time following them than the heroes. Depending on the Writer however, Sympathetic P.O.V. is sometimes given to the actual heroes.

Eddy from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, while not as evil as some of the examples, is still a cynical con artist who will do every dirty trick in the book for money. Including stealing Christmas presents from children. He has his reasons, but still.

Killface of Frisky Dingo is a supervillain protagonist who built a doomsday device designed to launch Earth into the sun, and he's still way more sympathetic than Jerkass superhero Xander Crews.

Futurama: Bender is a greedy and amoral criminal who constantly lies, cheats, and steals from everyone. Although Bender really does like his best friend Fry, he is not above swindling him as well.

Golan The Insatiable. The title character is a demigod from another dimension who has no problems with killing anyone and causing mayhem, but he's also a Large Ham who still wets the bed and tries to hang out with high schoolers and become homecoming king by pretending to be a teenager. The show's other main character, Dylan, is a young goth-looking girl who also finds joy in pain and misery, but also thinks turtles are cute, finds a molted Golan to be adorable, and deep down just wants her mom to be proud of her (though she doesn't like to admit it).

Mandy of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is so evil that she makes Grim, the personification of death, look like a nice guy in comparison and so he ends up as a much more downplayed example than her.

Zim of Invader Zim, an alien trying to Take Over the World. He is juxtaposed to Dib, a preteen paranormal investigator trying to stop him. One could argue that the issue becomes confused for this show, however; while the majority of episodes focus on Zim, there are so many Villain Episodes that some fans would argue that Dib and Zim could both be seen as the protagonists, and that the show has one Villain Protagonist and one traditional hero.

Task Force X are focused on during their mission to infiltrate Justice League headquarters and steal an invincible armor forged by the gods in the Justice League Unlimited episode named after them.

While Bugs Bunny was generally a sympathetic character, there have been several episodes where he became a straight up villain. Examples of this include Elmer's Candid Camera (he picks on Elmer unprovoked), "Elmer's Pet Rabbit" (where he heckles Elmer for no justifiable reason),(which admittedly are with Bugs Bunny prototype Happy Rabbit so they may not count), "Tortoise Beats Hare" and its follow ups "Tortoise Wins by a Hare" and "Rabbit Transit" (where Bugs is portrayed as an egomaniac who's willing to harm and cheat just to beat a turtle), "Wabbit Twouble" (again, picking on Elmer unprovoked), "The Wacky Wabbit (picking on an unprovoked Elmer again), "Buckaroo Bugs" (where he's a flat out thief and bully), and "Rebel Rabbit" (where he wreaks havoc on the US solely because the bounty for rabbits was so low, doing atrocities like filling up the grand canyon and sawing Florida off the mainland, breaking into congress during session and physically assaulting a senator, and by the end of the short gets so out of control that the military is called in to bring him down).

Daffy Duck also had several bouts of this trope, such as "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (where he causes trouble in a Hollywood studio for the heck of it) and "Boobs in the Woods" (where he heckles Porky Pig for the sake of causing trouble). This only intensified during his later meaner years where he evolved into a genuine villain, albeit still often with the primary spotlight (see above).

"Honey's Money" is the only Yosemite Sam short where Sam is the star, rather than playing antagonist to Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck.

Clay Puppington is this in the third season of Moral Orel, which focuses more on him than the other two seasons. Several episodes showcase his Villainous Breakdown.

The Title Character of Mr. Pickles is a satanic dog who kills and tortures many people and has a number of human slaves. Since he still saves the day a number of times, he can be considered a mix of this and Nominal Hero.

Wolf from Nu, Pogodi! is one. Much like the Coyote from Chuck Jones' "Coyote and Roadrunner" shorts, the Wolf drives the plot... except that his entire raison d'etre is to eat the Rabbit, who more often than not is minding his own business.

Wacky Races designated villain Dick Dastardly became this when he got his own show a year later. Always noted as being devious and despicable but saddled with three charges who rank from inept to chronic backstabber, Dastardly would often wonder (in one episode) "what's a nice guy like me doing in a cooped-up outfit like this?"

Woody Woodpecker went in and out of being this and an Anti-Hero in the original cartoons. Sometimes, he just goes about breaking the rules or causing trouble for the mere thrill of it or just out of ignorance, and is clearly shown to be a selfish glutton who will mow down or manipulate anyone who gets in the way of his food. On the other hand, he did occasionally star in a sympathetic light (i.e. "The Hollywood Matador") and by the late 40's his Anti-Hero traits were played up more by director Dick Lundy, especially when Buzz Buzzard entered the series. By the 50's, Woody veered between being a straight up hero, a villain and an anti-hero, and by the mid-50's both of the former traits were dropped altogether in favor of making Woody a straight up hero character.

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